“Cook County is a whorehouse,” says Cook County commissioner Maria Pappas. “But I’m one of the most disgustingly tenacious people you’ll ever meet.” Pappas drives the traditional politicians absolutely nuts, and it’s easy to see why. For one thing, she’s a psychologist (as well as a lawyer), and she talks like one, in great looping swirls of rhetoric that meander into lanes and alleys that may not always seem relevant to the topic at hand. Cook County pols are not noted for an abiding interest in early-childhood memories, for speaking of “staying sane” as “the global task for the year 2000,” or for invoking the golden rule and the brotherhood of man with a straight face. And it’s hard to think of another officeholder (outside California, anyway) likely to send a reporter a copy of a turn-of-the-century allegorical poem with the explanation, “‘Ithaca’ is my philosophy of county government. This is the best. This says it all.”
Yet Pappas is also eager to talk about what afflicts society and government, and how to cure those problems. “I’ve isolated things into three themes,” she says. “I come out of a kind of psych/attorney background, so my perspective of government probably is slightly different than many officials who sit in office. I have spent years in community-based work, both here and abroad, and I have a scheme of how I see things transpiring in society.
“If we intend to become more cost-effective in the 90s, both in regard to hospitals and to jails, it’s less feasible to keep pouring money into addressing crisis management and more feasible to look at underlying causes–i.e., prevention.
The term “type A personality” could have been coined to describe Maria Anastasia Pappas. Tall, thin, dark, and intense at 42, she chain-chews Clorets gum and spends as much time playing with her cigarettes, rolling them between red-nailed fingers, as she does puffing on them. Her small office, with windows overlooking the lobby and the street, was designed to be fashionably stark, but mounds of papers clutter it. She shares the space with two red-cheeked cockatiels: shy Plato, who stays in the cage, and outspoken Crete, who cocks a beady eye at me while perched on her mistress’s shoulder.
Her parents, both children of Cretan immigrants, were born in this country, but Greek was spoken in the home. “I can express some things better in Greek than in English,” Pappas says. She played organ in her Greek Orthodox church, directed the children’s choir, and claims Byzantine music as one of her specialties. Her parents were extremely careful with their money; she grew up in a house that didn’t have a shower. The Pappases owned a plant store, a toy store, and a restaurant that was adjacent to the only hospital in town. “Interns from all over the world came in and out of this hospital. And I had the privilege of being with them. I knew early on that I wanted to do something in the area of human services. I knew that I would do something with people.”
“I knew that at 19 someone had not gotten into this type of trouble unless there was a reason. Well, I found out that years before, while the mother was working, the 12-year-old boy had been left alone with his 9-year-old mentally retarded brother. The mother told him to feed his brother lunch and mow the lawn. So he fed his brother a peanut-butter sandwich and went to mow the lawn–and when he came back his brother had choked to death. That discouragement led to drug use, which led to drug dealing, which led to 26th and California.
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“I went to court for him; the judge had seen me testifying in various cases. I had my heart in this case. I believed we shouldn’t be spending $18,000-plus a year to incarcerate someone like this. I told the judge, ‘He’s absolutely guilty. There’s no question. But I want five minutes of uninterrupted time. Please don’t ask me any questions until I’ve finished. I’m gonna ask you to please shut the courtroom door and ask everyone to be quiet, because I think that what I have to say will have a tremendous impact.’ And I gave the most heartfelt Clarence Darrow-type argument that anyone had ever heard. And when I finished, the clerk was crying, the sheriff was crying, the other mothers in the room, who were in similar situations, were crying. And the judge said, ‘I release this man to your custody.’ Then he said, ‘Pappas, I want to see you in my chamber. Case closed. Recess.’ I went back into his chamber, and he said, ‘I want to know why you’re not practicing law.’ I said, ‘I really like what I’m doing.’ And he felt that I should get formally trained in law so I could combine these two fields, because I had such a good understanding of the justice system. So I quietly got a law degree.”
